158 NATURE STUDY. 



most helpful to allow or encourage children to thus 

 personify, beginning always with facts gained through 

 perception and elaborated by apperception, but letting 

 imagination add flesh to what might otherwise be dry 

 bones. In the study of cotton, the cotton-pickers and 

 their pickaninnies and homes and life are more inte- 

 resting than the mere process of planting and cultivat- 

 ing and gathering cotton. The processes of lumbering 

 mean most when the study is centred about the lum- 

 bermen, the human element. These give connection 

 and life to the processes. 



We come now to the place of imagination in deter- 

 mining method. When our boys and girls have seen 

 what they can about the dandelion blossom, and, by re- 

 lating what they have seen to what is already in their 

 mind, have gained a fair idea of the number, size, form, 

 and color of its parts, they should have a mental picture 

 of the flower. If this picture is to be of much value, 

 they should have the power of bringing it into the 

 mind, or rather into consciousness, again, when the blos- 

 som is not before their eyes, repeating or reproducing it 

 at some later time. But this power of repeating the 

 image or mental picture is of comparatively little value 

 if the pupils can only repeat it exactly as they first saw 

 it. It is necessary to take from that picture some 

 features not essential, such as the size of the yellow 

 disk, which varies in different specimens, and to add 

 points noticed in other dandelions, so that the children 

 can gain the general idea or general notion of dandelion 



